Sunday, August 31, 2008

Prices of manufactured goods and raw materials rose less in July than in the previous four months but were still far higher, after a record-breaking oil price spike, than they were a year ago, Statistics Canada reported Friday.

The news is grim for Canadian manufacturers because prices they pay for materials are rising much faster than prices they get for goods leaving their plants.

The manufactured goods price index was up 0.4 per cent from June and 6.8 per cent from July 2007. The raw materials price index was up 1.4 per cent from June and 28.9 per cent from July 2007.

Linamar Corp. of Guelph, Ont., confirmed Tuesday that it is trimming 400 to 500 more people from its 12,000-strong workforce in tough times for the North American auto and construction-equipment industries.

National Bank of Canada saw its share price jump almost six per cent Thursday after it reported a record third-quarter profit even after taking another hit, $37 million this time, on its ill-fated foray into asset-backed commercial paper.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Toronto economist Jeff Rubin, who has predicted that oil will hit $200 US a barrel by 2010, says drivers should brace for gasoline to spike to $1.75 Cdn a litre this year as storms threaten oil production in the Gulf of Mexico.

CIBC World Markets, where Rubin is chief economist and chief strategist, issued a statement Friday quoting him as saying that tropical storm Gustav is "tracking another potentially lethal swath through America's energy heartland" three years after hurricanes Katrina and Rita upset production there.

The Canadian economy has skirted a recession so far this year as Statistics Canada reported Friday that gross domestic product grew at a weak annualized rate of 0.3 per cent in the second quarter of this year.

The federal government agency said Friday that it has also revised the first quarter annualized rate from its initial estimate of -0.3 per cent down to -0.8 per cent.

That means the country has avoided a recession — at least using the common definition of two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.

Virtek Vision International, an industrial laser company based in Waterloo, Ont., saw its share price slip just a cent Friday after it announced a ceasefire in a takeover battle launched by a U.S. competitor.

Canadians who do shift work report lower levels of satisfaction with their work-life balance, according to a recently released study from Statistics Canada.

While 22.6 per cent of people who worked a regular day reported being dissatisfied with their balance between their work and personal lives, the percentages were higher for people working on shift.

Percentages of shift workers who said they were dissatisfied ranged from 23.1 per cent of evening shift workers to a high of 37.7 per cent of shift workers who were on-call or casual. Statistics Canada said night-shift workers reported a 27.2 per cent level of dissatisfaction, while split shift workers came in at 32.6 per cent unhappy with their work-life balance.

The average Canadian employee was paid about $789 a week in June but had less buying power than a year earlier, the latest federal figures suggest.

Statistics Canada reported Wednesday that average weekly earnings rose 2.5 per cent in the 12 months, including a slim increase of 0.1 per cent from May to June. The earnings figures are adjusted to smooth seasonal swings.

The agency previously reported that consumer prices were 3.1 per cent higher in June than a year earlier after rising 0.8 per cent from May to June, also on a seasonally adjusted basis.

Toronto stocks were up more than 230 points at times Wednesday, lifted partly by a paradoxical enthusiasm for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, which reported a 91 per cent drop in quarterly profit.

CIBC shares gained as much as $3.87 or 6.8 per cent to $60.93, even though the bank disclosed more big losses in little-understood markets involving structured credit, special-purpose entities, collateralized debt obligations, asset-backed commercial paper and other financial arcana.

Toronto-based Cott Corp., a struggling giant in the business of making house-brand soft drinks, saw its share price fall another 16 per cent Tuesday after it lowered a 2008 earnings target and withdrew a target it had set for 2009.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The Alberta government said Tuesday its budget surplus for this fiscal year is projected to be $8.5 billion because of higher-than-expected oil and gas revenues.

The surplus is $7 billion higher than the government projected in its budget released in April.

"I think it's clear that Alberta is still leading the nation," Alberta Finance Minister Iris Evans said after its fiscal update was released during the first quarter. "Our economic outlook continues to be bright."

The British government began an investigation Tuesday into how a computer containing highly sensitive bank information of over a million people was sold via online auction site eBay.

The laptop computer, which was sold for just under $70 to British IT manager Andrew Chapman, contained customers' credit card applications, account details, signatures, cellphone numbers and mothers' maiden names.

The Royal Bank of Scotland and Natwest Bank confirmed their customers' details were included in the computer.

After 2½ months of making successively sweeter takeover offers that were rebuffed one after the other, Calgary-based Precision Drilling Trust has finally reached a deal to buy Houston-based Grey Wolf Inc. for nearly $2 billion in cash and equity.

The two companies announced early Monday that their boards of directors had agreed to the deal.

Precision Drilling will pay $1.12 billion US in cash and 42 million of its units to acquire Grey Wolf, which owns 121 drilling rigs in the United States — 10 times more than Precision currently operates there.

The recall of Maple Leaf Foods products will cost the company at least $20 million directly, but it's too early to say how much more of a hit it will take in lost sales and to pay for advertising to rebuild its image, the Toronto-based food conglomerate's CFO said Monday.

Over the weekend, a Maple Leaf meat plant in Toronto was confirmed as involved in a Canada-wide outbreak of the food-borne bacterial illness listeriosis. Maple Leaf upgraded a precautionary recall of 23 of its products, issued last week, to all 220 packaged meats from the plant. It said the recall would directly cost $20 million — 10 times more than first estimated.

Mayor Sam Synard says the project would have meant 700 jobs and a $100-million investment in infrastructure for the town.(CBC)

There is disappointment in Marystown, on Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula, after the Canadian government cancelled two major ship building contracts, citing bids on the project came in over budget. The announcement came in a press release late Friday night.

The real estate-led banking crisis in the United States has a bit of a Las Vegas feel to it these days as industry analysts and business executives handicap when the next American bank will shut its door.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

The world's largest glass bottle maker says it will soon close its B.C. facility, making it the company's third plant closure in Canada this year.

Owens-Illinois Inc. said it will shut its bottle-making plant in Lavington, B.C., by the end of October, putting 300 people out of work.

The Ohio-based company said the closure was necessary as Owens-Illinois works to rationalize its North American business and cut costs.

"This closing was driven by our ongoing global asset utilization process which identified the opportunity to shift our production to other North American facilities, resulting in lower energy consumption and production costs," said Scott Murchison, president of Owens-Illinois's North America glass containers business.

Conrad Black, who is serving a 6½-year sentence for fraud and obstruction of justice in a Florida prison, has lost his bid to have a U.S. appeals court reconsider his case.

The former CEO of media empire Hollinger International, who lost an appeal of his conviction in June, had asked the Chicago-based court to review its decision to uphold his conviction and hold a so-called en banc hearing in which all the actively sitting judges on the court would reconsider the case.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

The federal government said it ran a $1.7 billion surplus in June, after running deficits in April and May.

In a release issued Friday by the federal Finance Department, the government said the June surplus was down from the budgetary surplus of $2.8 billion it ran in June 2007.

For the first three months of the 2008–09 fiscal year, the federal budgetary surplus is estimated at $1.2 billion, down $4.4 billion from the $5.6-billion surplus reported in the same period of the previous year.

A group of Ontario farmers is claiming victory after Monsanto Co. agreed to sell its Posilac brand of synthetic cow hormones to drug maker Eli Lilly and Co. for $300 million.

Dave Mackay, president of the Renfrew County chapter of the National Farmers Union (NFU) and a former dairy farmer in Beachburg, Ont., told CBC News Friday that the sale is good news. Mackay, now a sheep farmer with a flock of 300, speaks for 150 farmers in Renfrew County.

Shareholders of Duvernay Oil Corp. voted strongly in favour of Royal Dutch Shell PLC's takeover offer, tendering 97.7 of their common shares as of early Friday.

Shell's bid for Calgary-based Duvernay is worth about $5.6 billion in cash. Shell said last month it will pay $83 a share for Duvernay, a conventional gas and oil exploration and production company.

Duvernay has properties in northeastern B.C. and northwestern Alberta. The company is relatively small, producing the equivalent of about 27,000 barrels of oil a day in May, mostly natural gas. Its first-quarter revenue was $55 million, net of royalties and a $40-million unrealized loss of financial instruments.

Years ago, about the only workplace where one heard the term "four-day work week" was in the public sector. After all, never-ending budgetary squeezes left governments scrambling for non-money incentives to give their workers.

Nowadays, however, more organizations are recognizing the benefits of packing 40 hours of weekly work into a smaller number of days. Whether they are actually doing anything to change their current set-up is still debatable.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Royal Bank of Canada is in talks with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over a possible deal to buy back as much as $1 billion in specialized securities that the Canadian bank sold to investors, according to the Globe and Mail.

The Globe cited an internal RBC memo as stating that the bank was discussing with New York state how to structure the repurchase of the approximately $1 billion in so-called auction-rate securities that retail investors bought in the last couple of years.

Research in Motion's answer to Apple's latest iPhone arrived in Canada on Thursday, the first new model of the popular BlackBerry handheld device in more than a year.

Rogers Wireless announced on Thursday that Waterloo, Ont.-based RIM's BlackBerry Bold, or 9000, would be available through the wireless company's 3G high-speed network.

The Bold has twice the screen resolution of the current Curve model, more internal memory and a glossy metallic look. It adds stronger Wi-Fi capabilities and access to third-generation cellular networks.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Two of the richest men in the world made a surprise visit to Alberta's oilsands Monday, oil industry officials confirmed Wednesday.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet visited the $9-billion Horizon oilsands project, owned by Canadian Natural Resources, just north of Fort McMurray. Gates is the founder of Microsoft and Buffet owns the mammoth holdings company Berkshire Hathaway, which is worth a reported $62 billion.

Greg Stringham, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said the first he heard about the visit was when he got a call asking him to make a presentation to the two men and their entourage.

Two years ago, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams serenaded people in the province with a fight song that symbolized the struggle to get the controversial Hebron offshore oil project up and running.

"We believe in what we're fighting for; we love what we're fighting for — Newfoundland and Labrador," he croaked to a St. John's business audience back in 2007.

Nowadays, the combative Williams might be singing a different — and happier — tune.

A destroyed vehicle is seen in front of a hotel hit by a car bomb in Bouira, 60 miles southeast of Algiers. Twin car bombings rocked a hotel and military headquarters in the Algerian town of Bouira on Wednesday, killing 11 people, official media and witnesses said. (Ouahab Hebbat/Associated Press)

Higher prices Canadians paid at the gasoline pumps in June pushed overall retail sales across the country up by 0.5 per cent for the month to $36 billion, Statistics Canada said Wednesday.

The figure matched economists' expectations.

Statistics Canada said the June increase was mainly due to a 4.2 per cent hike from May in sales at gasoline stations. After factoring out price fluctuations for all goods and services, retail sales in constant dollars decreased by 0.4 per cent.

The government of Newfoundland and Labrador is estimating the province will gain at least $20 billion in royalties and up to 3,500 jobs from the Hebron offshore oil project, after a final agreement was signed Wednesday in St. John's.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

U.S. wholesale prices rose more than twice as fast as expected last month and topped the one per cent level for the third month in a row, according to statistics released Tuesday.

In July, American wholesale prices rose 1.2 per cent from the prior month as measured by the U.S. Department of Labor's producer price index, or PPI.

The PPI measure, which calculates price hikes for goods and services that companies buy from other firms, is often considered to be a measure of future retail inflation. Wholesale prices in July were more than 16 per cent higher than the same month last year.

Disgruntled investors, who bought asset-backed financial instruments, will need to go to the Supreme Court of Canada if they still want to scuttle an agreement in one of the country's largest financial meltdowns ever.

On Monday, the Ontario Court of Appeal turned down a bid by the investors to scuttle a 2007 deal concerning asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) investments.

The Ontario court said in Monday's decision that the agreement worked out between mainly larger investors last year can proceed.

Significantly fewer people travelled to Canada at the start of summer compared with last year, while more Canadians packed their bags for trips abroad over the same period, said a report released Monday by Statistics Canada.

Underlining a trend that has struck the Canadian tourism industry over the past months, the number of trips made by foreigners to Canada in June was down 12.7 per cent from the same period a year ago, the report said.

The government of Newfoundland and Labrador has announced the much-anticipated Hebron offshore oil deal will be signed Wednesday in St. John's.

Premier Danny Williams, Natural Resources Minister Kathy Dunderdale and representatives from the consortium of oil companies involved in the project will sign a final agreement at the Fairmont Hotel at noon, according to a press release from the Office of the Premier Tuesday.

The memorandum of understanding on the $5-billion project, announced in August 2007, expires on Thursday. The memorandum was reached after a fierce public battle between Williams and the companies over royalties and an equity stake in the project for the province.

Toy maker and art supply company Mega Brands Inc. said Tuesday that it lost $3.6 million US in the second quarter on falling revenues.

The Montreal-based company said revenue dipped 12.4 per cent year-over-year to $106.4 million on lower sales in its toy, stationery and activities product lines as well as additional product recall charges.

The company said its top line sales declined to $47.3 million compared to $57.9 million in the second quarter of 2007. The decrease in sales also reflects $2.5 million of additional product recall charges related to magnetic toys.

The restructuring plan for $32 billion in asset-backed commercial paper hit another snag on Tuesday as lawyer Howard Shapray, who represents Ivanhoe Mines, says he plans to take his case to the Supreme Court of Canada.

"We are appealing," Shapray told The Canadian Press in a phone interview a day after the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the controversial restructuring plan should go ahead.

"My client is a large investor and while there are small investors who are being squeezed in this process, the principles here are simply too important."

Monday, August 18, 2008

Asset-backed commercial paper, or ABCP, is short-term corporate debt that is made up of a bundle of loans like mortgages, credit card receivables and car loans. This debt is then resold to other investors, taking the original loans off the books of the company that first issued them. That can lead to lower lending standards because the originator of the loans doesn't have to worry about collecting.

China and India will continue to buy minerals, buoying global markets despite recent signs to the contrary, said BHP Billiton on Monday as the mining giant released its year-end financial results.

The Australia-based company said that problems in key markets and the sputtering global economy are combining to present miners with economic pressures.

But "while short-term disruptions may occur, we expect that their long-term growth will remain robust as they continue on the path to industrialization" said the world's biggest mining company in its earnings news release.

A mining watchdog group, a prospectors' group and an aboriginal leader are hopeful that public meetings will lead to the creation of a better Ontario Mining Act, but they all have some concerns about the way the government is approaching its review of the act.

The Ontario government announced on Aug. 5 that it would be holding public and stakeholder meetings in five Ontario communities between Aug. 11 and Sept. 8 to get input about how to modernize the century-old act that regulates mining in the province "to be more respectful" of aboriginal communities and private landowners.

Electronic Arts Inc. is not planning to extend its takeover offer for Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., maker of the hugely successful Grand Theft Auto video game series, but the two companies are talking about a deal.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Oil continues to be a hot commodity in Saskatchewan, with the second-biggest land sale in the province's history happening earlier this week.

The provincial government's August auction, in which companies bid for the right to drill for oil and gas, raised $242.7 million. That was only slightly above what was raised in the record-setting April auction.

"I think what it shows is ... we have a very competitive marketplace here in Saskatchewan [and] the companies are responding to that," said Energy Minister Bill Boyd. "They see a royalty structure, they see a regulatory structure, they see a business climate that is very, very positive."

A Quebec arbitrator has imposed a collective agreement on Wal-Mart for the first time in the world's largest retailer's history.

The arbitrator released the decision Friday on the contract for eight workers at a tire-and-lube garage at a Wal-Mart store on Maloney Boulevard in Gatineau, just across the river from Ottawa. The workers are represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Canada.

Guy Chenier, head of the local representing the workers, said the union is delighted with the deal, which gives the workers raises averaging 35 to 40 per cent effective immediately, as well as more vacation.

Sale prices for resale home slid by 3.6 per cent in July from the same month last year, according to figures released Thursday from the Canadian Real Estate Association.

The group said the average sale price was $327,020 last month, and it attributed the drop on fewer sales year-over-year in the four most expensive major markets in the country – Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary and Toronto.

Prices in Calgary were off 7.8 per cent year-over-year, while Edmonton saw a retreat of 5.3 per cent in the same time period.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

British Airways PLC, American Airlines and Spain's Iberia SA on Thursday announced a plan to team up and share pricing plans and flight loads, a move rival airlines say will limit competition and raise prices for consumers.

The plan, which must first be approved by U.S. and European regulatory authorities, would affect flights to and from the U.S., Mexico, the European Union, Canada, Norway and Switzerland.

BA chief executive Willie Walsh said the revenue-sharing plan if accepted would help the airlines as they struggle to cope with record-high oil prices.

Canadians are continuing to travel by car despite rising pump prices, Statistics Canada suggests in a report released Thursday on energy costs.

In 2007, Canadians drove 332 billion kilometres, an increase of 5.2 per cent from 2002, the federal agency said, noting the number of new cars on the road has also grown, climbing 9.4 per cent since 2002.

By comparison, a report released Wednesday by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration found Americans drove 19.6 billion fewer kilometres in June in year-over-year comparisons.

Canada's biggest publicly traded drug company lost money and saw its sales shrink in the second quarter as it absorbed the costs of a proxy fight, a management change and a losing legal battle over drug promotion tactics in the United States.

One of Canada's biggest public pension plans has teamed up with a Singapore government fund to buy almost 20 per cent of the biggest electric transmission and distribution network in Texas.

The price: $1.25 billion US.

The buyers: the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, better known as OMERS, and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, or GIC, which seeks places to invest the country's foreign reserves.

Apple introduced business e-mail support with its 3G iPhone, released July 11.(Ed Ou/Associated Press)

HSBC Holdings PLC, the world's largest bank, is considering ditching the BlackBerry in favour of the iPhone, according to an Australian report, a move that would be a huge blow to Waterloo, Ont.-based Research In Motion Ltd.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Crude oil prices may be falling, but pump prices continue to hover, in part owing to higher wholesale margins and the weakening Canadian dollar, according to Liberal MP Dan McTeague.

In his online gasoline-price report, McTeague, who represents the Ontario riding of Pickering-Scarborough East, calls current pump prices "unjustifiably high."

"Today's gas price decrease continues to see less of a decrease proportional to the drop in crude oil and NYMEX gasoline," he says in the report. NYMEX is the New York Mercantile Exchange, a venue for commodities trading.

Home-improvement giant Rona Inc. says its same-store sales fell 4.4 per cent in the second quarter, a setback it attributes to "a drop in consumer activity related to the decline in consumer confidence compared to the corresponding period in 2007."

Lobster fishermen on P.E.I. are already disappointed with the prices they're being offered for the first catch of the fall season.

The first traps were hauled in on Sunday, and the prices range from $8.80 to $9.90 a kilogram.

Those prices are even lower than what fishermen were getting earlier this year, prices that prompted the P.E.I. Fishermen's Association to ask the government to investigate buyers for price fixing. That investigation found no evidence of collusion, blaming the strong Canadian dollar, high landings, and a slow American economy for the prices.

The pension fund for former workers at the now-closed NOFG pork plant in Charlottetown has been a concern for months and now they've learned they'll be receiving only about half the pension they were expecting.

A giant piece of machinery bound for the oilsands of northern Alberta from Japan has arrived in Thunder Bay, Ont., marking the opening of a new all-Canadian shipping route.

"This is the first of many components for the oilsands to move through the port of Thunder Bay," said Tim Heney, CEO of the Thunder Bay Port Authority.

The 450-tonne reactor, a tube-like structure the size of three railcars used in oilsands extraction, is heading to Fort McMurray on its way from the manufacturer in Japan. It arrived in Thunder Bay after being carried by freighter through the Panama Canal, up the eastern seaboard and west through the St. Lawrence Seaway.

The Canadian Home Builders Association is taking issue with a recent report that says Saskatchewan's housing boom is headed for a bust.

In a report released by Merrill Lynch Canada last week, economists David Wolf and Carolyn Kwan say housing is more than 10 per cent overvalued in a number of cities, including Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Sudbury and Montreal — with the situation in Saskatchewan's two biggest cities the most extreme.

Saturday, August 9, 2008

The number of Americans seeking jobless benefits hit a six-year high in the most recent period, a sign that U.S. workers are feeling the pinch of a slowing economy.

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Labour said that 455,000 Americans filed for employment benefits in the week ended Aug. 2. That figure represented an increase of two per cent over the previous week and was the highest number of filers since March 2002.

Using a four-week average, 419,500 men and women were looking for jobless benefits, the highest level since July 2003.

Lumber and mill operations in small communities are being hurt by the tough economic conditions facing the industry.(CBC)

The $1-billion government trust intended to help Canada's stressed single-industry communities and their residents is almost invisible in Ontario forestry towns, but in B.C., the same program is providing a short term lifeline to centres facing economic disaster.

The federal government should spend the money it raised in its recent wireless auction to improve the country's broadband communications network, not on debt reduction, said the CEO of Telus Corp.

Ottawa should take the $4.2 billion in cash raised from its auction of wireless radio spectrum and build broadband communications access to more communities, Darren Entwistle said Friday.

"Canada has an unprecedented opportunity to enhance our global competitiveness by bringing broadband internet services to hundreds of communities," he said as the company released its second-quarter financial results.

Imperial Oil Ltd. is delaying a decision to proceed with its $8-billion Kearl oil sands proposal, a move which could push the start date for the plant north of Fort McMurray, Alta., back by one year, the company said Thursday.

A successful environmental challenge and design revisions to the project have increased costs for the proposal, Imperial Oil said.

Now, Imperial Oil is targeting the first quarter of next year to make a final decision whether to go ahead, company officials noted.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Toyota said Thursday that its fiscal first-quarter profit plummeted 28 per cent and stuck to its forecast that full-year profit will fall for the first time in seven years as it faces more problems from the weakening U.S. market.

Toyota Motor Corp., which had been riding on the success of its fuel-efficient cars, has consistently posted growing profit since it started reporting under U.S. accounting standards.

But sliding North American sales, a strong yen and rising material costs have battered the earnings of Japan's top auto maker, which is on track to end ailing General Motors Corp.'s 77-year reign as the world's top auto maker.

The blockbuster movie The Dark Knight brightened the financial picture at Imax Corp. in the third quarter, but not enough for the company to break into black.

Imax, which makes ultra-sophisticated movie projection equipment, lost $12.2 million US, or 29 cents a share, in the third quarter of 2008. The net loss figure for the company was almost three times the $4.5 million, or 11 cents a share, Imax lost in the same three months of last year.

Starbucks Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Howard Schultz stands near the coffee shop's original store at the Pike Place Market in Seattle. The company introduced an 'everyday' brew hoping to revive slumping U.S. sales. (Elaine Thompson/Associated Press)

Montreal's Metro Inc. plans to spend $200 million to switch the names of a number of popular Ontario grocery chains over to its flagship Metro brand, the company said Thursday.

That means that by the end of 2009, well-known supermarket labels, such as A&P and Dominion, will likely cease to exist, although the outlets themselves will continue to operate.

"We will convert our five conventional banners over a 15-month period to the Metro name. Following this conversion, the Metro banner will be a 376-store-strong national network that will contribute to the company's future growth," Eric La Flèche, Metro's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Manitoba and Saskatchewan, not Alberta and British Columbia, will be the country's hottest areas economically in 2008, the Conference Board of Canada predicted on Tuesday.

The two lower-profile prairie provinces should post the highest gross domestic product growth rates in Canada this year, the Ottawa-based business think tank said.

The Conference Board released its latest economic forecast this week.

Red-hot Saskatchewan will grow at a 4.2 per cent clip, while Manitoba's economy will expand by 3.6 per cent in 2008, the Conference Board estimated. Their results are being driven by high oil and gas prices and soaring demand for those provinces' grain crops.

Magna Entertainment Inc. said on Tuesday its future is in "substantial doubt" as the horseracing heavyweight tries to work off its huge debt load.

Magna Entertainment, which has $230 million US in borrowings due within the next 12 months, said it would miss its end-of-year deadline to eliminate the company's outstanding debt.

"Although we continue to take steps to implement our debt elimination plan, U.S. real estate and credit markets have continued to demonstrate weakness in 2008 and we do not expect to complete our plan on the originally contemplated time schedule," said Magna Entertainment's chief financial officer Blake Tohana.

Canadians will tell friends and family how much they weigh, how they voted or the state of their love life.

But money changes everything.

A survey conducted for the Bank of Montreal indicates that money matters top the list of sensitive topics, ahead of religion, politics, weight and other matters deemed too sensitive for discussion at the dinner table.

The bank reported Wednesday that the topic that left most respondents uncomfortable was:

Agrium Inc. posted its highest-ever quarterly earnings on Wednesday, one day after the Egyptian government cancelled plans for the company's controversial new fertilizer plant.

The Calgary-based phosphate and potash heavyweight earned $636 million US, or $4 a share, for the April to June period this year. Those results represented a huge jump compared to the $229 million, or $1.70 a share, Agrium made for the second quarter of 2007.

The U.S. Department of Justice has charged 11 people in connection with electronic break-ins involving the theft of 40 million credit and debit card numbers, including thefts from a company that operates the Winners and HomeSense stores in Canada.

The 11 include three U.S. citizens, three people from Ukraine, two from China and one each from Estonia and Belarus. The 11th person is known only by the online alias "Delpiero."

The accused face charges ranging from conspiracy and computer intrusion to fraud and identity theft.

Hudson's Bay Co. on Tuesday appointed Canadian Bonnie Brooks as president and chief executive officer of its flagship Bay department store chain.

The move continues the makeover of Canada's oldest retailer since Hudson's Bay was purchased by American real estate magnate Richard Baker in July.

Brooks, who had been president of Hong Kong's Lane Crawford Joyce Group, will be charged with remaking the Bay into a "premier department store," said Jeffery Sherman, president and CEO of Hudson's Bay Company, which owns the Bay and Zellers.

The Canadian dollar sagged in trading on Tuesday as slumping oil prices turned investors away from the loonie.

The loonie dropped 1.3 cents US to 96.02 cents US in mid-morning trading. Investors were dumping the loonie because of the perception that Canada's economy will be hurt if crude oil prices keep slipping worldwide.

When talks aimed at getting a new global trade deal began back in 2001, officials might not have believed it would take seven years for the countries in the World Trade Organization to reach an agreement.

But you can bet no one would have predicted that, at the end of this tortuous process, the 153 nations of the global group would be walking away from the bargaining table empty-handed.

Rothmans Inc., Canada's only publicly-traded cigarette company, agreed Thursday to a friendly takeover offer from tobacco giant Philip Morris International Inc. that values that Canadian company at $2 billion.

PMI is offering $30 a share in cash for Toronto-based Rothmans.

A condition of the offer was that Rothmans settle tobacco-smuggling charges in Canada. That settlement with the governments of Canada and the ten provinces was also announced Thursday.

Prairie farmers earned a record $7 billion from grain sold through the Canadian Wheat Board in 2007-08 — a 57 per cent increase over the previous year, the agency said Thursday in its annual report.

According to Larry Hill, chair of the Winnipeg-based grain marketer, the earnings worked out to more than $8.40 a bushel for high-quality spring wheat and more than $12 a bushel for high-quality durum, after freight and handling expenses are paid.